The reasons, as we’ve discussed, include the growing expectation of seamless experiences from the consumers’ viewpoint and the rising importance of platforms and ecosystems in which new products or services exist.

Minimum Viable Footprint

Today I’d like to highlight a new idea – innovating for the “Minimum Viable Footprint”, an idea that was first proposed in Ron Adner’s book entitled The Wide Lens.  Adner defines the “Minimum Viable Footprint” or MVF as “the smallest configuration of elements that can be brought together and still create unique commercial value“.  The MVF is the logical outcome of two realities:  first, the already discussed idea that innovators need to innovate more than just a product, but must consider the ecosystem in which the product will reside, and second, the concept of a minimum viable product – something many companies already understand and practice. 

If we can accept that innovation in the future must be more than a discrete product, then the “MVP” concept is becoming rapidly dated as it deals specifically with a product (concept) alone. It does not tackle the wider systems we believe are emerging.  Adner’s MVF is the logical next step – understanding and producing just enough of a mixture of product, business model, channels and experiences and blending the MVP with enough “footprint”, the necessary services, channels, data, ancillary devices and so on that exist in the ecosystem.

In fact, the more you want your new innovation to “disrupt” the market, the more you need to turn your attention to more than just a discrete product.  Customers today have enough disconnected, discrete, disparate products.  They no longer want to work to make these products, services and business models fit together.  Instead, they expect more integrated, seamless solutions and experiences.

MVF and Seamless Experience

To understand how to achieve a seamless experience, you first must understand customer needs and expectations.  That’s not new news.  Where things go wrong in these investigations today is that innovation teams define customer product needs and features, and neglect to understand the entirety of the expected solution.  We’ve linked previously to Geoffrey Moore’s Whole Product concept and have suggested that we rename it the “Whole Solution”, to fully embrace the definition of what customers actually want.  To deliver that “whole solution”, you will need to leverage products, services, channels, information, apps and other capabilities to round out your offering and create the seamless whole.  The faster you understand that your product won’t thrive in isolation, and that it must be fleshed out and augmented by other products and services, the better your innovation can be.

This realization, that you don’t innovate alone, should spark a couple of new insights.  First, you should be asking yourself: what capabilities do we have internally?  What is the inventory of products, services, channels, information and so on that we have within our company that can extend the innovative offering.  Most companies don’t understand or take advantage of their breadth and depth of capabilities, at a time when combining products, services, channels and information becomes so much more important.  Second, once you understand your capabilities and have mapped them to the “whole solution” needs, can you bring them to bear in the solution?  And then, equally importantly, what are the capability gaps you have between what you can offer and what the customer expects from a “whole solution”?  These gaps must be filled by third parties, who provide apps, data, channels, services or ancillary support products.  Identifying them, and working in concert with them, is vital.

Minimum Viable Experiences and Transformation

Of course these ideas build on each other.  The MVP was adequate for products, but increasingly customers want and demand more.  Adner suggested the MVF, establishing a product with just enough “footprint” of ancillary products and services to validate with customers.  In this regard, the MVF suggested by Adner should create what we believe is ultimately the most important “minimum viable” outcome, the idea of a Minimum Viable Experience (MVE).  Customers want seamless solutions and validating experiences.  If we as innovators and producers aren’t considering how to deliver a MVE, then we will be left with yet another unsatisfactory product.

This idea relies to a great extent on the innovator’s own ability to innovate, to transform its channels and services and business models.  Innovation doesn’t just change the market or customer, increasing it must also change the innovator, leading to another “minimum viable” outcome:  Minimum Viable Transformation (MVT), in which the innovator is the one being transformed.  While we’d like to claim we invented this idea, Deloitte has done some good thinking on how and why Minimum Viable Transformation is important and necessary.

Increasingly it will become clear to you that innovation is not something you do to create products for customers, but innovation is something that happens sometimes simultaneously in products, channels, experiences and even business models.  Minimum viable product is just the first step toward minimum viable footprint (to address customer expectations) and minimum viable transformation (to transform the business to serve the customers’ needs and business model expectations).  To see this in action, look no further than GE’s transformation from a financial services behemoth to an Internet of Things company, or Ford’s rapid transformation from a car company to a transportation company.

What would a minimum viable experience (MVE) look like for a Ford customer in the future?  One stop shopping for transportation needs, where Ford and its partners seamlessly provide a customer with transportation (perhaps costed out by the trip or the mile, depending on customer needs), insurance, lifetime maintenance and warranties, perhaps even a choice of vehicles depending on needs (van for the school day, SUV for the weekend, convertible for date night, etc) all fulfilled through a seamless ecosystem. Ford is already introducing FordPass, which could become the platform on which many of these services rest.  If this seems far-fetched, consider what Lynk & Company are doing – creating a fully web-enabled car that is shareable.

Conclusion

In this post we’ve introduced a number of new ideas, most importantly building from the accepted concept of an Minimum Viable Product to Minimum Viable Footprint to Minimum Viable Experience.  This represents a spectrum of solutions an innovator delivers.  Also important is Minimum Viable Transformation (MVT), the transition that the innovator themselves must undertake in order to fully deliver the MVE.  In the next series of posts we’ll go a bit deeper into some of these ideas.

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If these points make sense to you, the question becomes, how do we create seamless customer experiences?  What makes up the solution?  How do ideas like the Geoffrey Moore inspired “whole product” combine with tools like customer experience journeys and design thinking to help an innovator understand the potential seamless solution?  And, how does an innovator decide what components in the ecosystem or solution they should create, and which to partner for or rely on external partners for?

I’d like to begin this post by arguing that this issue stems from another fallacy – the fallacy of being “customer centric”.  Every company will tell you they are customer centric, but beyond a thin veneer of customer research and marketing, companies are organized around discrete products or capabilities, not organized around customer needs, buying habits or behavior.  To be truly “customer centric” a firm would organize around what customers care about most, giving this the most emphasis in structure, information systems, compensation and so on.  Clearly, this isn’t the case and is increasingly reflected by the lack of interesting products, services and experiences.  But we can’t, in a few blog posts, reorganize the entire hierarchical structure of a business.  But we can help you to migrate to  a better understanding of the customers’ expectation for seamless experiences.

What do customers want?  It’s not a product

First, get a true understanding of what customers want.  And by this I mean a true understanding of the total solution customers want and need, not the distinct features customers want most in your product. As we’ve seen previously, discrete stand-alone products not integrated into the customer’s ecosystem rarely solve a customer’s problem or address their needs.  Rather, they become yet another thing customers have to consolidate or integrate to make it work.  Start by taking into consideration all of the customer’s needs, even if you can’t create solutions to address them.  Think about the total, seamless solution the customer is asking for.  You do this through different types of customer interaction and research, namely voice of customer, jobs to be done, customer experience journeys and other activities.  But instead of “jobs to be done” your goal is to define the customer’s “experience to be had”.  Take the larger view.

Many of our customers will (and have) responded: those other needs aren’t in our core competency.  This is true, but ignoring the adjacent and complementary needs and expectations that make your product a solution results in a Pyrrhic victory.  You may be “on point” with your answer but the customer doesn’t care.  Solving customer needs and creating seamless experiences requires you to think about the solution more broadly, to catalyze or join ecosystems.

What do you build?  What do you catalyze?  What do you join?

Next, decide what, if anything your products, services, business models and experiences can do to offer a complete solution.  This may mean you need to innovate a product, AND a service, AND a business model at the same time.  That’s OK.  Or, it may mean that your innovative product must rely on a third party data source and an open source platform to deliver value.  Pandora, for example, delivers music (not its own) to listeners on devices (not of their manufacture) to listeners based on stated preferences often using platforms (Bluetooth) to facilitate listening in different settings (car, wireless speakers).  You aren’t required to build everything but you are required to understand the components that make up the solution and determine how those will become realities for the customer.  What can you deliver?  What platforms can you leverage?  What relationships do you need to build?

Experiences matter most

Next, start innovating the products, services, business models, etc that you can develop internally, while simultaneously working relationships and partnerships with those pesky third parties you’ll need to provide a “whole seamless solution”.  This may mean you need a new role we referred to earlier. In an earlier post we talked about the importance of a product manager, but said that an “experience” manager might be as, if not more, important.  Who is responsible for understanding and translating the customer experience, so that internally or through identified partners, channels or platforms you can fully deliver the expected experience.  After all, in most cases the product, or service, or business model you are delivering is only a portion of the total experience, and no matter how great your solution is, it is likely to fall flat without the other supporting factors.  Experience managers are equally important, and currently not represented in innovation.

Product managers and developers, by their very definition, are focused on the features and benefits of a tangible or intangible product.  They may recognize ancillary products or services that their product relies on, channels the product travels through, information that supports the product use, but they won’t focus on innovating those other concepts.  An experience manager will see the bigger picture, understand the customer’s needs in context of the ecosystem of products, services, channels, experiences, data and other important components that come together to create a seamless experience.

Experience Managers Required

There’s still a need to innovate around products, but increasingly product innovation is just incremental innovation.  In the book the Wide Lens by Ron Adner, he quotes Jeff Bezos talking about the Kindle.

The Kindle provided a one-stop shop, a simple, inexpensive way to purchase and enjoy anything from Jane Eyre to the latest New York Times best seller.  Presenting the Kindle, CEO Jeff Bezos announced “This isn’t a device, it’s a service”.  Unlike Sony’s reader, the Kindle offered a complete experience for the customer…

Some key ideas here: one-stop shop (seamless), not a device but a service (really, it’s both, as well as a new business model and channel) and the idea of “complete experience.

If you want your innovation to have real impact on the market and create significant profits, it’s going to need to be more than a product.  It needs to create a seamless experience, and to do that you may need to innovate a product, a service, a business model and a channel.  Only an experience manager will have a large enough aperture and responsibility to see all of these things and the responsibility to work on all of them.

Other reading

McKinsey has a nice piece on customer experience, written as an educational piece targeting senior executives. While this piece still focused on customer experience and not a complete seamless experience, it is well worth your time.

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Jeffrey recently wrote this, initially on his blog site of Innovate on Purpose and reproduced here.

We felt this is an important point of understanding to bring into this dedicated site as it addresses one of the present sets of challenges we need to resolve, one of updating our innovation tools, thinking and methodologies.

Paul & I have started outlining the key needs of change here  in this dedicated site and will through an evolving series of blog posts about innovation, ecosystems, platforms discuss these changes and needs to respond to what we believe customers will ultimately demand:  seamless experiences.

The post New innovation realities require new mindsets and tools first appeared on Your Ecosystem Design Hub.

Today, customers are busier, smarter, have shorter attention spans and most importantly have less desire to make products or services work together.

Apple,  Amazon, and EBay are examples that  have taught customers that products, services, data, experiences, and design can all work together to provide a totally seamless experience.

Increasingly, this is what customers are increasingly wanting, and to do that you’ll need to rethink the way you innovate.

In Jeffrey Phillips post “Using ecosystems to build seamless experiences” we raised this present poor understanding within a business, that many lack a good understanding of customer needs.  Actually, it is far worse than we initially felt, still more on that later.

This is a longish read but an important one, to frame our need to think through innovation differently, through a new lens. Take your time, knowing why we need to change is critical. There is a new innovation era that holds promise if we think differently.

Customers do expect seamless experiences, they want them curated, personalized and do expect authentic experiences that are matching their lifestyles, needs, preferences, and habits. Solutions are needed to fit into the tasks constantly evolving for them, in this connected network world we increasingly live in. Innovation needs to deliver on these changing expectations.

How can we achieve seamless experiences when we don’t have seamless organizations?

Yet before we get to argue for this real customer need of seamless experiences we have to resolve the lack of our seamless organizations. How can any digital transformation take hold within the organization when there is such a serious lack of customer-centricity? Business units stay locked in silos, being measured by how they perform their tasks, they continue to build their individual business case, often over the detriment of others.

Business units still feel they are internally competing for scarce resources and capital and guard what they have jealously. The internal push is constantly on the need to invest in the front-and-back-end solutions, yet they lack this understanding of the customer journey, totally filtering out significant parts of the customer expectations, preferences, and values, if they do not fit their internally measured task at hand.It is not the ideal environment for a ‘seamless’ anything.

Something has to change within organizations but what? Regretfully these highly disjointed and dysfunctional structures are totally irrelevant to the customer and their needs and until this re-orientation to serving the total customer experience need is recognized, organizations remain ‘locked’ in the past. Customers live in a world increasingly highly connected to their ways, it can be designed, adapted, extendable and full of experimental solutions they can piece together and maintain a level of control over. They expect smarter, personalized, connected and responsive solutions to their needs as they interact within this new ‘social digital contract’.

Customers live in a world increasingly highly connected to their ways, it can be designed, adapted, extendable and full of experimental solutions they can piece together and maintain a level of control over. They expect smarter, personalized, connected and responsive solutions to their needs as they interact within this new ‘social digital contract’.

Business has to find ways to connect back with the customer who is running faster ahead.

Connecting individually, organization by organization is going to be a slow and limiting path to take. The value of connecting in the cloud, on platforms, and in ecosystems accelerates the transformation need dramatically, yet it is demanding work and entails significant leadership, vision, risk, and change. This challenge of digitally connecting their organization, encouraging them into the outside world, most leaders are just not comfortable to do and often the least equipped to do it as they are not so digitally connected. It is wrenching work in almost every way to set about transforming how a business needs to be managed today to respond, survive and relearn the digital transformation going on.

This challenge of digitally connecting their organization, encouraging them into the outside world, most leaders are just not comfortable to do and often the least equipped to do it as they are not so digitally connected. It is wrenching work in almost every way to set about transforming how a business needs to be managed today to respond, survive and relearn the digital transformation going on.

The transformation path we read about focuses far too heavily on big data, analytics and all the promise of rewards yet to come. We need to think utterly differently. If you do not eradicate this ‘inward’ focus and place customers at the core then those that fail to adopt will eventually perish. We need to learn to connect, engage and collaborate across the entire ecosystem that has the potential to change our, single part of this, ‘out there’ is enormous innovating potential.

Technology is disrupting everything around us.

The mantra of “we need to accelerate innovation to grow” may still be top of a leader’s agenda but it is the ability to become agile, flexible and ‘seamless connected’ to be constantly evolving, adapting to change, and meeting customers that are moving faster. Customers are well aware of the overwhelming choices they have and want a seamless experience when they do engage, anywhere, anyhow and anytime.

Customers today are quick to judge, fast to walk away. You might pour hours into your website, your brochures, TV and media promotions but if you fail to connect and offer a fast response to inquiries or complaints then you are history! If you cannot offer the ability to track orders in real-time, still can only interact on limited channels and restrict or have disconnected ‘flows’ of information that can’t be accessed easily, then you are rapidly becoming prehistoric! If a business does not understand all the

If a business does not understand all the touchpoints within the customer’s experience journey how can they design this into a more ‘seamless experience’?

We do need to “walk in our customer’s shoes”

We all hear that phrase “we need to walk in our customer’s shoes” but do we honestly, even understand what this truly means? Executives often view the world from the safe environment of their office, disconnected from the real world, still reliant on historical data and predetermined views of delivering discrete products or services that get a job done.

Today businesses just fail to engage with their brand in the way customers do, how can they when most inside organizations are not allowed to use most of the social media sources while at work? Knowing how the customer works, the decision-making process in his or her mind needs engagement, it needs real-time engagement, it needs connecting constantly, prompting and probing, in multiple interactions, not discrete moments to gain a richer holistic insight, to turn into lasting value-adding conversation for all sides involved.

We here talk about how customers do not want discrete products, they want to connect, engage and build more, much more if the relationship was more of a two-way partnership and as this still remains only one way the business simply misses out, if it can’t adapt to this changing, demanding customer world of extracting what makes sense for them, personally.

Take a look at Amazon and how it quickly went about building different business opportunities as it connected into the customer at its core, it saw the potential need and capitalized on the opportunities. Nike has become far more than a brand of shoes or sporting apparel, with the connecting of the ‘experiences’ have now become the brand. It has gone from selling sneakers to being a lifestyle brand, launching ‘wave upon wave’ of fitness programs and concepts, ensuring the designed products meet that lifestyle needs through a partnership engage constantly with their customers. The end result is how it cements the customer loyalty and their experience constantly, one that builds a bigger innovation potential and growth business.

Our problems lie within ourselves operating as a distinct stand-alone business entity

So many of our organization struggle to have a good understanding of their omnichannel presence, they lack a comprehensive customer journey map in many of our organizations and  can’t leverage all the channels, they stay ‘fixate’ on their internal issues and problems. They continue to live in a disconnected world until they understand the customer need.

The sad thing is, many of the executives within organizations recognize that they must create a better customer experience, solve the constant messaging across multiple platforms and organizational response. Yet how many still have not even taken that one, defining step of creating a single, integrated customer response or engagement unit?

In all honesty, most of our businesses today are at a shockingly early stage in designing a technology roadmap that aligns to the customer journey need. They can’t track, connect, engage, integrate and customize. They still focus on sales volume and repeat purchase on what they have and cannot yet consider lifetime sales potential, or know how to build customer influence on others.

If you find time just read the two reports shown as links at the end of this post. Not pretty reading.

The message is “customers make little conscious distinction” on what you worry about

Customers have changed their habits in many ways and business organizations need to react to that in convincing ways. The question is how quickly can they transform as this is a real ‘burning platform’ for many.

Customers, when they hit problems, they exit fast, become disenfranchised and the word quickly spreads, from family to friends, into both physical and social media communities, to quickly raise their bad experience and undermine the fabric of organizations reputations and brands built over many years.

The overwhelming need to change

The risks are rising of being disrupted lie within the organization’s unwillingness to change. Unless the focus does not shift dramatically to working progressively towards a delivery on connecting a seamless customer experience, one valued and increasingly expected today, the organization will struggle to engage fully and understand the customer decision making. The question becomes how can organizations transform themselves quickly enough when it seemingly seems highly complex?

This is where ecosystems and platforms come in.

Just imagine each silo has to plug into the same platform to engage, build into and extract. Visibility quickly rises, collaboration becomes increasingly the order of the day. Through the cloud, platforms and across business application, all are operating on the same operating system, not multiple versions, waiting for IT and budget justification to update.

The engagement becomes where and when the network and collaboration parts grow in importance, as feed into and live off of each other making a living, engaging ecosystem. You turn from being inward to engaging outward in all your measurements, metrics, and rewards. ‘Reacting and responding’ becomes more central to employee incentive to pay against as “the effectiveness measure” needed today to the essential collaborating need.

You then begin to turn from being inward to engaging outward in all your measurements, metrics, and rewards. ‘Reacting and responding’ becomes more central to employee incentive to pay against as “the effectiveness measure” needed today to the essential collaborating need.

Equally, the ability to have all ways of connecting with the customer managed in real-time, in the cloud and on connecting platforms, built on evolving knowledge, insight, and understanding, where the data flowing in, from the multiple touchpoints. Imagine all being captured, understood, personalized and built into a ‘web of understanding’ that drives the insights that generate the next level of innovation.

Then as you build your awareness of the ecosystems of your own business and its capabilities, mix in the customer’s engagement and needs you begin to recognize the value of others, within the design chain, those other stakeholders who are the expert in different parts of the connected need of customers.

‘Dumb’ or discrete products turn into ‘smart’ ones and ‘stand-alone’ products become connected platform solutions that those within the ecosystem jointly work upon, as they meet the existing personal needs. Yet they also extend these out in surprising new ways so the customer experience goes way beyond what is existing, it captures their imaginations and quickly becomes their choice.

Increasingly the value is residing in this complex web of collaborations, working towards delivery of seamless experiences, made up of multiple brands building constantly on what they are learning in the ongoing engagements.

A pipe dream or beckoning reality – your choice?

We are witnessing the connecting of technology, people and things in dramatically different ways. The recognition that moving towards the goal of providing ‘customer seamless experience’ lies in leveraging across platforms, ecosystems, different vested parties and working to align all of what this means, by making the customer the centre of the focus, so by deepening their experience, the value in return is greater than what  one individual organization can offer today, as it stays unconnected in their ecosystem.

It is hard, demanding and risky work. The rewards equally are not crystal clear so you can provide a safe ROI to those not hearing the stirring going on that movement of the ‘restless herd’, their customers, on the edge to stampede, thinking about their need to seek out new feeding (engagement) grounds, leaving you, the bricks and mortar tsar, staring at dwindling sales, wondering where your customers have gone.

No one suggests this is not an easy journey, far from it.

Evolution takes time, it is deliberately breaking with quarterly returns, it is our imperative as businesses to take a longer-term investment perspective but multiple impact points along this transforming journey.

Can we determine a transformation that yields increased market share, positively impacts employee morale, increased customer revenue, increasing customer engagement and greater volume of channel options to design innovation around?

It is a different world, made possible by recognizing what technology, ecosystems, platforms and striving towards the seamless experience that we can all drive towards, it is becoming an essential journey which allows innovation to enter a new era, to deliver the returns needed for the investments-to-be-made.

In summary

We must move from thinking of innovation as an exercise in creating distinct, stand-alone products and think about the customer’s total needs and expectations.  Rarely do customers need one product or service to meet their needs, they constantly need to seek connections everywhere, why not deliver these to them?.

Companies that recognize the value of ecosystems and organize themselves around these will have a distinct advantage.  For too long the focus on innovation has been too narrow.  We should think about concepts like ‘experiences-to-be-had’ and not the ‘jobs-to-be-done’ as we need to connect far more broadly across our ecosystems to adapt and thrive in new ways.

We do need to widen the aperture through ecosystems and platforms but narrow the focus down to deliver complete solutions that meet customers’ needs and expectations, in increasingly seamless ways. To do this all involved need to see things differently through a new, more connected, lens.

TWO Essential Reads that I have drawn insights from to help me build my thinking here.

The 2016 State of Digital Transformation by Altimeter, a Prophet company.

Creating a Seamless Customer Experience by the Economist Intelligence Unit, 2015.

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In the first post of this series, Paul Hobcraft framed what we believe is an exceptionally important issue:  innovation doesn’t really work the way we’d like it to.  Far too often, innovation creates incremental, discrete products that don’t seem to drive customer engagement, don’t create disruption in the marketplace and don’t drive a significant amount of revenue or profit.

There are many reasons we could point to – poor understanding of customer needs, risk and uncertainty constraining innovation teams, lack of innovation process and training on the part of the innovation teams, little to no funding, and so on.  These are common challenges that innovation teams face.

However, we believe that many innovation challenges stem not from a lack of internal knowledge or capability, but from misunderstanding the customer and his or her expectations about experiences.  Customers today expect seamless experiences, supported, maintained and enabled by complex ecosystems of products, services, business models, channels, information, and complementary products and services.  Customers aren’t interested or willing to acquire disparate products and services and integrate them. Increasingly customers prefer to acquire seamless experiences, and this expectation will dramatically change how companies innovate.

The problem of narrow focus

For decades, companies have organized  around products or services.  Most companies have teams organized to develop, produce and manage products. Staffing and budgeting processes are tuned to assist in the development, production, marketing and sale of discrete products.  This is an efficient organizational model, but increasingly doesn’t mirror consumers’ needs and expectations today.  In the past, solving a customer’s need was more simple.  When products didn’t exist, companies can provide a discrete product and the needs were filled.  When incomplete or inadequate products exist companies provide a more interesting alternative.  Today, when customers basic needs are filled and they are overwhelmed with product choice, they aren’t satisfied with yet another discrete product offering.

Maslow’s hierarchy explored a similar phenomenon for humans, in that we first fill basic needs, such as physiological and safety needs before filling aspirational needs. Similarly, once basic product and service needs are fulfilled, customers seek seamless experiences based on compatibility, integration, ease of use and customer experience. This means that how we innovate needs to change.  There’s a fundamental mismatch between companies, which are still optimized to create discrete products, and customers who seek seamless experiences based on robust ecosystems.

Stephen Elop, who was brought in to save Nokia as its market share and profits were taking a beating from Apple, noted this trend.  In a fascinating note to his colleagues now known as the “burning platform” memo, Elop said:

The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems.  In this case it is where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things.  Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem.  This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyze or join an ecosystem.

This memo was written in 2013, and the understanding of future market conditions is prescient.  Elop recognized that Apple was winning because it had defined an ecosystem of products, services, apps and data that provided a nearly seamless experience.  The iPhone is valuable to consumers, but what makes it a compelling SOLUTION and a seamless experience is the range of apps, developers and other services and capabilities.  For its “ecosystem” Apple defined and built on previous experience with the iPod, and controlled a lot of the ecosystem through iTunes or other factors.

Most companies won’t be able to have as much control over an ecosystem as Apple did, but that does not excuse them from needing to understand the ecosystem they are targeting with new products, and how that ecosystem will embrace and support their discrete product, or whether, in Elop’s words, the innovators will need to “build, catalyze or join” an ecosystem.

Ecosystems and “whole products”

Discrete products typically address only a portion of a customer’s real need.  Customers are often required to combine products, services, channels, information and other components to create the solution they need.  Recognizing that customers leverage ecosystems, and gain value from products or services as the products and services themselves integrate to ecosystems, means that innovators can’t simply create discrete products and ignore the ecosystems those products will enter.  Increasingly, understanding the ecosystem and its expectations becomes as important as understanding product requirements and features.  In fact one could argue that companies should employ “Ecosystem” managers whose job it is to define the ecosystem that’s required for a complete customer solution in the same way they employ product managers to define product requirements.

This need refers back to what Geoffrey Moore, in his book Crossing the Chasm, called a “whole product”, except that now that definition is too narrow.  Moore’s idea was that early adopters were willing to acquire and use relatively raw technologies or discrete devices, while the majority of the market would wait for a fully realized product supported by help manuals, customer testimonies and other supporting or enabling capabilities.

Rather than “whole product” perhaps we should call the necessary outcome a “whole ecosystem” or “whole experience”.  Moore’s insight holds true today:  customers want “whole” solutions or experiences, and those solutions and experiences are going to rely on products, services, information, complementary services and experiences that we may not control. As an innovator, understanding the importance of the ecosystem in providing a seamless experience, and understanding what your eventual solution will offer, and what other capabilities, services, information or experiences must be wrapped around your offer, will ensure much more receptivity when the solution is launched.

Moving from ecosystems to seamless experiences

Increasingly, customers don’t want to knit, integrate, or combine products or work to connect products and services to solve problems.  Increasingly they want solutions that work out of the box, fully integrated with a fabric of existing products, services and channels.  What customers want is seamless experiences, which are supported by robust ecosystems.  Customers want solutions that don’t require them to worry about compatibility, solutions that don’t require a lot of configuration or knowledge on the part of the customer. They want solutions that don’t result in vendors blaming each other for failures.  They don’t want to search for information, they want the solution to present relevant information.  These seamless experiences are built on robust ecosystems, which is why innovators must consider them.

In some instances an innovator may discover that an ecosystem exists and there are gaps within the ecosystem he or she can fill.  In other cases an innovator may discover that the discrete product or service being created requires more services, channels or experiences than can be created by the company, and therefore the innovator must build or catalyze an ecosystem in order to fully address customer needs.  Ecosystems of products, services, business models, channels, partners, experiences and so on provide the total solution a customer seeks:  an integrated, whole, seamless experience.

Based on this analysis the job of an innovator changes.  No longer can they focus solely on discrete product requirements, because we know that a product or service is likely to provide only a portion of the expected seamless experience.  Now, the innovator must define the totality of the seamless experience and then determine which components or portions his or her company can provide, which of the components or solutions that other companies or partners will provide, and work to ensure that these disparate components, services, business models and information will work seamlessly for the customer.

This means the innovator must simultaneously understand customer needs broadly, apply them narrowly to construct a new product while understanding the larger context the product or service will exist in, and attempt to weave together a range of different, potentially competitive providers to provide a solution that solves the customers problem or challenge and seems seamless and effortless to the customer.

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